Author Archives: Richard Gibson

About Richard Gibson

Richard works for Return Path in their UK office managing the relationship with their channel partners, predominately email technology providers. Return Path seeks to perfect the art and science of email by championing inbox standards for senders and receivers.

He is also a long standing Email Marketing Council member having been elected twice to the council, originally joining as a co-opted member in 2003. Prior to which he served on the Business-to-Business board elected committee between 2001 and 2003.

Since 2004 he has Chaired the Benchmarking Hub which continues to deliver The National Email Marketing Benchmark on a quarterly basis along with the annual client survey which has become an important source of information for DMA members.

He also worked with IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) to organise the first ever joint evening event between the two trade bodies; ‘Email Marketing: Art or Science’ held at The Rex Cinema in February 2007.

He has regularly contributed to trade press articles, blogs and a book on the topic of Email Marketing and has chaired and spoken at UK DMA events as well as presenting DMA research in several European countries. In 2005 he was voted by B2B Marketing Magazine as one of the top twenty opinion formers in the UK.

Prior to joining Return Path in April 2009 he was Commercial Director for RSA Direct and has many years direct and interactive marketing experience.

Is it your time to get engaged with the Email Marketing Council?

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The election season is upon us. And it is important to both the DMA and the Email Marketing Council to ensure this is as widely publicised as possible as the work of the EMC requires a full council and one that is as widely representative of all constituent stakeholders as possible.

Over time we have had members that have been very active participants, who for whatever reason have stood down and the election time lends itself to be the perfect time to bring new members to assist with the work of the council. Two such recent members that have stood down are Denise Cox of Newsweaver and Simon Bowker of Teradata/eCircle both of whom have contributed to numerous projects and outputs in their time as a council members and I’d like to extend my personal thanks to them both for their efforts and valuable contributions over numerous years.

Immediately post-elections the council must align its outputs and objectives for 2013-2014 in line with the DMA’s business plan and the initiatives from the Chairs of all of the DMA councils which include; putting the foundations in place for greater cross-council collaboration and supporting development of the value chain and improving the customer journey.

The Email Marketing Council has some objectives that are on-going including the updating of the Council’s Best Practice Document, the production of White Papers all of which are designed to help the membership and support our desired goal to champion email as an essential part of the greater marketing mix and an effective direct marketing channel.

In short there is much work to do and those with an appetite for helping should consider standing and getting involved as proactive council members – now is the perfect time to get involved. I consider us to be an accessible council as we maintain an open door policy to observers that wish to attend our council meetings as well as encouraging active participation to the work of one of our hubs. If you have previously considered standing for election and for whatever reason have not done so historically then I would encourage you to reconsider, but do so quickly as you do not have long at all – the closing date for entries is this coming Friday 22nd March at 5:30pm.

The website to register as a candidate can be found here, if you have any questions please contact either myself or Georgina Lippa (Project Manager, Media Channels) directly via email: georgina.lippa@dma.org.uk or via telephone: 020 7291 3317.

Richard Gibson, Chair Email Marketing Council and Director Client Services, Return Path.

A further chance for your input on the proposed EU Data Protection Regulation

Email Customer Lifecycle: List Growth

Language and deliverability

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Taken, as I have been of late to reading about the topic of language and linguistics I paused to think how the topic might relate to deliverability, often seen as a deeply technical subject. It is my hope that the metaphor of language may be useful to those that consider deliverability a deeply technical subject.

Just as the English language evolved from Proto-English to the Modern English we use today the definitions of actual words and their usage has changed and evolved. How does this relate to deliverability? Allow me to explain – depending on who you talk to deliverability can, and historically has been defined differently – rather, inconsistently. Certain actors may define deliverability as the number of emails for which bounce codes are not returned; personally I prefer to think of this as an accepted rate and not perfectly helpful and far from an accurate success measure. At best it gives an indication of what may have been received by the ISP’s. A further challenge for those technically minded is that these bounce codes vary and aren’t always reliable in terms of interpreting where the email message was ultimately delivered to – if at all. The definition of deliverability calculated from number of email sent, less the bounces could also be more accurately reported as ‘received’ as in received by the receiving server – i.e. not rejected.

However if you follow with the language and linguistic theme and specifically English accents ‘Received Pronunciation’ (which is sometimes known as The Queen’s English, Oxford English or BBC English) has historically been seen as a standard for ‘correct’ pronunciation. In my mind whilst ‘accepted’ and ‘received’ are in the vocabulary it creates confusion in respect of deliverability and they are far from perfect or correct. For me the preferable definition is a measure of delivered to the actual inbox. It is far more reliable than using the aforementioned bounce codes and more indicative of success.

Just as from the 16th Century onwards there was a movement to standardise the English language, particularly spellings which varied mostly because of many regional dialects. Creating uniformity was aided, in part by dictionaries of varying quality. With the release of the next iteration of the DMA’s ‘Email Benchmarking Report: Half 1 2010’ data on inbox placement is available for the first time. It is my hope that for email marketers this will have a similar effect as Johnson’s Dictionary had on the English language in the 18th Century – namely to provide the definitive and pre-eminent definition.

Whilst I expect that just like those dictionaries available before the publication of Johnson’s other definitions of deliverability won’t disappear overnight it is my hope that this document and the incorporation of this new data point will help email marketers by defining deliverability to the inbox as an important success metric and the most correct way to define deliverability.

DMA members are able to download the report here.

Captain: Red alert! Incoming variable response signals!

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Those familiar with the original ‘Star Trek’ television series may be familiar with the following scenario; a previously un-seen character that happens to wear a red coloured uniform is amongst the first to be teleported from the Starship Enterprise to a new planet after the distress signals are heard on the bridge. An unspeakable peril waits on the new planet. Our previously un-seen character is amongst the first or indeed the very first to meet a tragic end.This ‘signposting’ technique can frequently be found elsewhere in cinema and television and not just in Star Trek, you don’t have to look very far to find it.

What on earth does this have to do with the subject in hand, namely email marketing? Quite a bit and more than you’d think actually. Signposting, whilst recognisable in the television example just doesn’t happen in terms of deliverability. The ISPs or filtering companies aren’t in the habit of communicating to marketers the landscape that they are responding to.

That is because their primary goal is to protect their customers and not to help or signpost for the benefit of email marketers. The ISPs have to respond to a dynamically changing set of incoming mail streams and threats to their network and their customers. The same is true for the filtering companies whose customers may be the ISPs or those that aim to secure their corporate infrastructure. Their objectives for their customers may include conserving resources, saving bandwidth and stopping all incoming threats.

What this means in practical terms for marketers is that just because you have good deliverability and inbox placement rates today, doesn’t mean that it will remain so tomorrow and in to the future. It’s this variability that impacts response. As an example it may transpire that a marketer notices a significant depression in opens or clicks from a segment of the database. Upon deeper investigation the impact can be clearly seen across one or two important domains. Logic may suggest that the receiving ISP (or filtering company) may be blocking the incoming mail.

This variability can be evident to those with access to the actual inbox placement data, those without it most likely will struggle to understand, troubleshoot and ultimately rectify the root cause. Whilst ISPs don’t signpost in the same way that ‘Star Trek’ did, marketers can minimise the impact in variability by understanding their reputation, knowing their inbox placement and considering third party accreditation programmes.

Dreaming about deliverability

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The plot of the science fiction film ‘Inception’ centres on the interesting concept of planting ideas in the dreams of the unwitting dreamer, the objective being that so that when the ‘dreamer’ awakens the idea is freshly planted in the subconscious.
This imaginative concept set my mind racing on which ideas, specifically related to deliverability I would plant in some marketer’s minds as key thoughts so that when they awaken the ideas might crystallise during waking hours:

1. Move away from the thought process that all emails that are sent make it into the inbox. Not true! In fact, ISPs, filtering companies and consumers all block, filter and report email as spam, meaning that only a subset of all mail sent is actually delivered to the inbox.

2. Focus on improvements; be obsessive about understanding what the metrics are that can improve overall response, start to think about Inbox Placement Rates (IPR), seek to improve, make it a KPI. Challenge all comers who state ‘delivered’ or ‘accepted’ is a reliable guide to what makes it to the inbox, because it is not. The fundamentals of reliable calculations require the accurate use of a broader collection of metrics.

3. Think about deliverability, not as a terse-technical subject dominated by those responsible in the technical team, or that someone else worries about so they the marketers don’t have to .Think about it as something that everyone in the organisation should be aware of and have some insight of.

After the dream the marketer will awaken with these three thoughts at least somewhere in the mind and when met with the word ‘deliverability’ their eyes won’t glaze over or worse still ignore one of the most important aspects and barriers to success.

Richard Gibson, Channel Relationship Manager at Return Path and Chair, Email Marketing Council. Twitter: @RichardGibson.